The restaurants were limited in number, for New York had not acquired the restaurant habit as strongly as it has it now. When you have mentioned Delmonico’s, Taylor’s, Curet’s, and the Café de l’Université, you have almost a complete list of the places to which fashion drove in its brougham after the theatre. The playhouses were plentiful enough, considering the size of the city. None was north of Twenty-Fourth Street. Wallack’s, at Broadway and Thirteenth Street, was considered the best theatre in America. The Grand Opera House, at Eighth Avenue and Twenty-Third Street, was called the handsomest. Surely it was costly enough, for Jim Fisk, who had his own way with Erie finances, paid eight hundred thousand dollars of the railroad stockholders’ gold for it, to buy it from the railroad later with some of its own stock, of problematical value. [Illustration: THE FIRST NUMBER OF “THE SUN” UNDER DANA The Title Heading Has Remained Unchanged for Fifty Years. ] [Illustration: THE HOME OF “THE SUN” FROM 1868 TO 1915 The Famous Old Building at Nassau and Spruce Streets. ] The Academy of Music, at Fourteenth Street and Irving Place, housed Italian opera. The Théâtre Français, also on Fourteenth Street, but near Sixth Avenue, was the original home in this country of opera bouffe. Opera burlesque prevailed at the Fifth Avenue Opera House, on West Twenty-Fourth Street. The Olympic, on Broadway near Houston, had been built for Laura Keene; it was there that Edward A. Sothern first appeared under his own name. Barney Williams, the _Sun’s_ first newsboy, was managing the Broadway Theatre, in Broadway near Broome Street. Edwin Booth was building a fine theatre of his own at Sixth Avenue and Twenty-Third Street--destined to score an artistic but not a financial success. Club life was well advanced. In the house of the Century Club, then in East Fifteenth Street, the member would come upon Bayard Taylor, George William Curtis, Parke Godwin, William Allen Butler, Edwin Booth, Lester Wallack, John Jacob Astor, August Belmont. The Union League was young, and was just about to move from a rented home at Broadway and Seventeenth Street to the Jerome house, at Madison Avenue and Twenty-Sixth Street, where it remained until 1881, then to go to its present home in Fifth Avenue at Thirty-Ninth Street. In the Union League could be seen John Jay, Horace Greeley, William E. Dodge, and other enthusiastic Republicans. Upon occasion Mr. Dana went there, but he was not an ardent clubman.